Why Organizational Alignment Is the Real Fan Experience Problem

After 30 years of working in fan experience for teams, leagues, and events around the world, I can tell you the most common cause of a poor fan experience. It's not the food. It's not the ticket prices. It's not the video board.

It's the gap between departments that don't talk to each other.

Lately I've walked into some great venues in sports and entertainment with state of the art video boards, really good production teams, and passionate ownership, and still found fan experiences that fell short. Almost every time, the problem wasn't talent or technology. It was alignment. Or more precisely, the lack of it.

The Symptom vs. The Disease:

Organizations see the symptoms usually which can be a flat crowd, low satisfaction scores, disengaged staff, and they reach for production solutions. A new graphics package. A different DJ. Louder music during timeouts. Sometimes those things help at the margins. But they rarely fix the real problem.

The disease is almost always deeper: departments operating in isolation, with unclear ownership, no shared language, and little meaningful communication around the fan experience.

I worked with one organization where their content request software, the system designed to manage what gets created and when, was being used completely differently by the content creation team and the game presentation team. Each department had built its own workflow around the same tool and neither knew how the other used it. When content wasn't ready or the wrong asset showed up in the show, both teams pointed fingers at each other. Neither was entirely wrong. But the real failure was that no one had ever sat them down together to agree on how the system was supposed to work. That's not a technology problem. That's a communication and leadership problem.

What Misalignment Actually Looks Like on Game Day:

Departmental silos don't stay backstage. They show up on the field, on the court, and in the stands and usually the fan or ownership feels every one of them, even if they can't name what went wrong.

Consider what happens when in game entertainment doesn't know what the sponsorship team has sold, or when operations and production aren't aligned on pregame timing. I've seen both play out in ways that were impossible to hide.

One client had a pregame parade with multiple extremely large ticket groups. The parade ran long. Players needed to get on the field. The parade and the athletes were occupying the same space at the same time, and the game was delayed as a result. What was supposed to be an great pregame moment for those group ticket buyers became an awkward, confusing experience and a headache for everyone backstage scrambling to fix it. The parade itself was great. The planning process that surrounded it wasn't.

These moments don't happen because people aren't working hard. They happen because departments are working hard in different directions.

What Employees Actually Tell You:

One of the most important parts of my assessment process is sitting down with employees both full-time and part-time staff separately. What I consistently hear surprises new clients but has stopped surprising me: people genuinely want to do great work. They just don't always know what great looks like in their organization, or they haven't been told the plan.

At one organization, I sat down with a group of game day part-time employees who were enthusiastic, engaged, and full of ideas about the fan experience. One idea kept coming up: a particular feature they loved running and believed fans enjoyed. They were vocal advocates for it.

What they didn't know and had never been told was that the team's owner had specifically said they didn't like that feature and didn't want it in the show. That direction had been communicated somewhere at the top of the organization and had never made it down to the people actually running the game day production.

This is what misalignment costs you: well-meaning, hard-working people executing against a vision that the leadership has already moved away from and nobody connecting those dots. The part-timers weren't the problem. The communication chain was.

How You Fix It:

Alignment doesn't happen by accident. It has to be built intentionally, and it starts at the top.

The framework I use with clients comes down to three layers: senior leadership sets the vision clearly and communicates it consistently. Managers translate that vision into operational reality with workflows, processes, and cross-departmental coordination. Then staff execute with the confidence that comes from actually understanding what they're working toward and why.

When any one of those three layers breaks down, the fan experience suffers. When all three are working together, something remarkable happens, the whole organization starts pulling in the same direction, and fans feel that, even if they can't articulate why their experience felt so seamless.

This isn't about org charts or HR processes. It's about creating a shared language around the fan experience that is a common understanding of what success looks like, who owns what, and how decisions get made and communicated across departments.

The Question Every Organization Should Ask:

Before you invest in a new graphics package, a new PA system, or a new halftime act, ask yourself this:

Could every person working your next game from your CEO to your part-time camera operator describe the fan experience your organization is trying to create in the same way?

If the answer is no or even maybe that's where the work begins. Not on the show. Not in the control room. In the room where your departments sit down, get honest with each other, and agree on what they're building together.

That's the fan experience problem most organizations aren't solving. And until they do, no amount of production value will close the gap.

Matt Coy is VP of Experiences at CUENTO Marketing. He consults with sports teams, leagues, federations, and major events on fan experience strategy, assessment, and implementation. He also serves as a fractional VP of Game Presentation for select clients.